Other Voices: Damage from tariffs has started

Tuesday

May 8, 2018 at 2:00 AM

The financial impact can be devastating for newspapers.

GATEHOUSE MEDIA

A lesson in the costs and benefits of tariffs comes from our very own industry: the print media.

Specifically, the Commerce Department recently imposed substantial new tariffs on newsprint from Canada, which is driving up newspaper production costs across the country. For papers that are already struggling to keep up in the Internet age, the financial impact can be devastating.

These tariffs are not part of the Trump administration's more highly publicized bids to play hardball with China over trade or to rewrite the North American Free Trade Agreement. Rather, they stem from a complaint, pursuant to long-standing U.S. law, by a single Washington state-based paper mill that claims it is a victim of "dumping" by Canadian paper producers, which allegedly benefit from unfair government support.

The beauty of free trade is that it lets the market, not government, allocate resources according to neutral economic criteria, not subjective political ones, such as which paper mill has the ear of the Commerce Department. That is why the better answer to China's mercantilism was to surround it with a unified free market through the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

The tariff on Canadian newsprint is not yet permanent; if the underlying dispute between the two countries gets resolved by approximately Labor Day, it may be eliminated.

In this very narrow sense, it may be defensible: Threatening, or even applying, tariffs may be necessary as a bargaining tactic when everything else has failed, though we're not sure all else has failed in this case.

What has never been clear about the Trump administration, though, is whether it views tariffs as bargaining chips, or whether it views them as a permanent, strategic element of national economic policy.

Right now, the United States' trading partners, from Beijing to Berlin, are exploring the possibilities of compromise and trying to discover what concessions from them President Donald Trump might accept.

There is still a chance to avoid more costly trade conflicts, and more collateral damage at places such as newspapers across the United States — but only if Trump can take "yes" for an answer when other countries offer it.

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